for those who live and die for astronomy (Reply)

What I should be writing: Novel, Yuletide treats, plottish stuff for Milliways' Christmas Carol plot.What I'm writing instead: Further Warehouse 13/Once Upon a Time Hogwarts AU shenanigans. (Yes, both at once. Ruby insisted on being part of Claudia's story.)Because I'm enjoying this, have a snippet of Ruby getting her wand:Granny takes her around to everything but the owl shop, saving Ollivander’s for last. Given the news, Ruby’s surprised it’s open at all, but Granny just shakes her head, when Ruby asks.

“He never did know when to stop working,” she says, “or how to rest long enough. Not if it came to wand lore, anyway. Of course he’s open for business again.”

Mr. Ollivander looks like hell warmed over, but he still smiles like nothing’s wrong, asks Ruby for her wand hand and starts sorting through his selection. He babbles a while about Granny’s current wand (hawthorn and phoenix feather, fourteen inches, rigid as all get-out), her first wand (blackthorn, but otherwise identical) and Ruby’s mother’s, thus making the most Ruby’s heard about her mother in years.

“Ebony and Hungarian Horntail heartstring,” he says, pulling a wand out of Ruby’s hand before she can even try to swish it around. “Thirteen and a half inches, and every bit as inflexible as her mother’s, though I understand she used it to a somewhat different purpose.”

Ruby shrugs uncomfortably, and Granny’s mouth goes all thin, but Mr. Ollivander carries on having Ruby try wands like he hadn’t trodden on someone’s grave.

Finally, one of the wands shoots off a dazzling array of red sparks, and Ruby grins. She can tell this is the one even before Mr. Ollivander says so himself.

And so she goes down in his incredible stores of memory: Ruby Lucas, fir, Chinese Fireball heartstring, twelve and a half inches, a remarkably swishy piece of work – doubly so given her family’s history of intransigence in its wands.